At the bus stop where I catch the campus shuttle each morning, there are two benches, each of which usually has an ad on it. One of the benches has an ad right now that I find to be grammatically strange:

When I first saw this ad, I’d only heard of short selling as something in finance, a way of profiting off of a stock or commodity that you expect will drop in value. You sell somebody something that you borrowed, and wait for its value to drop, then buy back the borrowed thing and return it to the person you borrowed it from. It’s a dangerous form of speculation, and the excitingly-named “naked short sell” maneuver has been banned in a number of countries. Short selling in finance, therefore, is not very popular in the public mind.

A short sale in real estate, on the other hand, is a rescue maneuver. It’s designed to allow a homeowner who can no longer afford a mortgage the opportunity to sell the house at market value, even if that is less than the remaining balance on the mortgage. I don’t entirely understand how this is so different from a regular house sale, since it usually still leaves the original homeowner on the hook for the amount of the mortgage above the sale price, but hey, that’s why I parlayed my degree in math into linguistics and not into finance. And the details are irrelevant to the present issue, which is: why did Gary Kent or his copywriters choose to treat short sale as a verb? Why not use short sell as the verb?

The decision struck me as especially strange since it goes against parallelism; not three words earlier in the sentence, the verb sell is used. It certainly seems like a conscious choice to have used short sale as the verb and not short sell. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon choice to make. Google says there’re around 1 million hits of the phrase “how to short sale”, and “short sale your house” gets another 3.6 million. Here’s something especially crazy: the corresponding versions of these phrases using short sell are substantially less common, getting only 150,000 and 26,000 hits, respectively. Short sale is actually a more common verb than short sell!

So it’s probably not a mere error, which means that the psycholinguist in me can come out and wonder why people behave in this grammatically strange way. Why would one prefer a backformation of a verb from its nominal form, short sale, to its “standard” verb form, short sell? I don’t know, but here are four possible explanations I’ve come up with for why people might do this.

Compounding. It might be that the addition of short to sale changes the morphological properties of sell. People go back and forth on whether compound or affixed nouns and verbs are morphologically opaque. You might have encountered this if you’ve ever had a debate with yourself as to whether the plural is passers-by (morphologically transparent) or passer-bys (morphologically opaque)? Or mongeese versus mongooses? Or what about the past tense of forgo? (Personally, I avoid forgo in the past tense because I think both forwent and forgoed sound crummy.) It’s not always clear whether a compound form should be opaque to morphological processes. One possible explanation, then, is that the copywriter thinks of short sale as an opaque compound, and they won’t go in and change the form of just one of the component words. That forces the use of a null morphological transformation to create the verb from the compound noun, rather than going into the compound and changing the component noun sale back into the verb sell.

Differentiation. I mentioned above that I only knew short selling from finance. I imagine many other people are more familiar with the finance meaning as well. The problem is that short selling in finance has a bad reputation; it is widely viewed as a contributor to the market crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression as well as the crash that led to our current recession. A real estate short sale is designed to help a homeowner get out of the recession, so it’s probably a good idea to avoid making people recall the financial construction that threw them into their current predicament. Using a different verb form sets the two meanings apart a bit, perhaps reducing a seller’s discomfort with the transaction.

Idiomatic Avoidance. To “sell oneself short” is an idiom with a fairly negative connotation, meaning that you aren’t advertising your abilities properly, or you aren’t getting your money’s worth. To suggest that they would sell your house short, then, is something that no real estate agent would want. So the copywriter might have avoided “short sell” to avoid triggering “sell short” in people’s minds.

Recognition/SEO. One last possibility I’d consider is that the use of short sale is intended to ensure that the viewer of the ad will recognize what’s being talked about immediately. (The asterisks certainly suggest that the copywriter was trying to call attention to the short selling aspect of the ad.) This is especially important in the online world, where some browsers don’t perform stemming (looking for other morphological forms of a search term); if a searcher looks for “short sale”, some engines wouldn’t return an ad saying “sell or short sell your home”. The mild ungrammaticality is well worth the extra traffic, as any Search Engine Optimization consultant could tell you. And you would get extra traffic; Google Trends shows around 10 times as much traffic for “short sale” as for “short sell” over the last year and a half:

What do you think? Do you have any other ideas, or maybe even inside information from a real estate office, on the use of verbal short sale? Information on why a short sale without debt forgiveness is different from a regular house sale would also be appreciated.

(By the way, this is also a good example of why I’m a descriptivist. Trying to figure out why people go against grammatical standards a lot more rewarding than just condemning them for it.)

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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11 comments

I’m just an amateur, but I’m strongly inclined to interpret this as a case of what you call “compounding” above. In particular, I think that the morphological opacity is quite natural (compare Steven Pinker’s example of claiming a baseball hitter “flied out” instead of “flew out”), with only minimal help from your “differentiation” point.

The differentiation doesn’t even have to be a conscious decision to avoid “short sell” for its negative connotation. The speaker need only have known that that lexical entry was already consumed by something with the wrong semantics, which is an effect known to be sufficient to overcome other preferences.

I find your last point kinda unconvincing, but that’s just because my intuition is that the rather haphazard capitalization in the ad belies any thought on the part of author to aim for a particular coup d’oeil.

One last thing to consider is interference between the bare verb “sell” and the compound “short sell”. If the ad had said “to sell or short sell your home”, the similarity between the plain “sell” and the modified “sell” causes a bit of a parsing stumble when the reader has to decide why the more inclusive term doesn’t fully encompass the restricted term. With “short sale”, there’s no morphological reason to think of them as the same term.

Interesting contemplation of the reasons for the short sale/sell grammaticla deviation. Ina short sale the lender accepts the lowereed amount and forgives the loan difference between what was owed and whas the new purchase price is. For example, if I owe 100k on my loan but can sell it for only 80k, the lender wipes the 20k difference clean (except for tax purposes).

The four reasons you’ve supplied appear sound, and it would be next to impossible to determine which one was really in the mind of the person responsible for this monstrous work of ad copy.

My limited experience with editing, real estate and linguistics tells me this is a case of “make it fit.” I tried to rewrite the ad to make it sound better, but I always ended up lengthening it here or there. My new version might sound better and show signs of rhetorical brilliance, but when it is formatted for the back of a bench, it would require smaller letters in certain places and line breaks in others. Font size and line breaks are part of the message because they are part of the limitations of the medium in this case.

I’m thinking a copywriter had little to do with this advertisement because it reads terribly and shows no ear for style. Instead, I would be more willing to believe the real estate agent handled the whole process of writing up the ad and getting it to the print shop folks who print up and post these things. Real estate agents tend to operate with a good deal of independence when it comes to promoting themselves, so this agent probably handles much of his own advertising and did not subject his ad copy to much of a review before the print shop printed it and ran it over to the people who own that bench.

So I’m thinking the real estate agent probably was letting issues of compounding run right over issues of parallelism. He was also probably avoiding such voo-doo verbal phrases as “short sell” and “selling short.” Even worse, he showed a devil-may-care attitude to writing well and just went for the phrase that worked in that search engine I’ve heard about. But I’m also thinking he wasn’t aware of any of this as it swirled and cycled between his ears.

“Let me short sell your house” would strike me as a weird form of “sell your house short”…

Do I short sell it or sell it short? If the former, that’s a good (sure?) sign that “short-sell” is a compound verb, and since it came from a noun phrase, it’ll (most likely) be regularized to “short sale it”.

And in fact, I can see on Google a lot of “short saled (my/the) house”.

“… since it usually still leaves the original homeowner on the hook for the amount of the mortgage above the sale price,…”

Actually, no. In the current context, a “short sale” is one in which the lender accepts what the house can be sold for in the current market as payment in full, even though it is less than the amount of the mortgage. Lenders are willing ot do this because it can be cheaper that foreclosing. Since the lender agrees to accept the payment in full, it does not show up as a default on the seller’s credit.

I think that “short sale” is more Googlable because a world of people with bad habits assumes it will be more understood than the correct “short-sell.” The hyphen is necessary to show that the two words make a single verb, though so many people have forgotten what parts of speech are and why it’s important to make them clear that the hyphen has fallen out of use. This doesn’t prove that parts of speech are irrelevant; it only shows that they’ve been forgotten. The omission reveals a problem, not a lack of one.

“Sale” gets back-formed for the same reason. If I want to sell my house in a world that doesn’t recognize parts of speech, it behooves me to type the phrase I think will return more hits. If enough people appreciated parts of speech, “short sale your house” would look so stupid that I wouldn’t expect many hits from it and would type “short-sell” instead. It’s a vicious cycle: accommodate the error and your query becomes the next tiny voice in the chorus that perpetuates it.

It’s charitable of you not to want to condemn Googlers, but it would be very naive for you to pronounce them correct on the basis of their numbers. All the world could one day prefer two and two to equal five, but that wouldn’t make it true.

Anyone know whether to hyphenate it as “short-sale” when using it as a compound adjective, as in “if you want to buy a short-sale property”? I see it both ways in various publications, but more often with no hyphen.